Where Have We Been? [Finding a Flock: Part 6]

—PJ King

As you may have heard before, Katie and I have recently moved to Fort Worth. Now, we need to go through the difficult (and important!) process of finding a local church to join.

I don't presume to have all the answers, but I would like to publicly go through this search, so that perhaps we can all learn something. In this series, I hope to explain what I am specifically looking for in a church, detail how I am going about looking, and perhaps, relate some of my experiences to you.

Be sure to read the entire series of Finding a Flock.

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The last time I updated you on our church search was back in April. Since then, we have spent much time in Oklahoma, visited Waco a number of times, and took a vacation to Washington D.C. We ended up being out of town each weekend in May, but managed to be in town for most of June. Katie is now well into her work as a pediatric nurse; this will (hopefully) help us stay in town on the weekends.

We have been able to visit churches three times since our last update. We visited a church1 with the Krychos (who happened to be in town) in early June, and have been able to re-visit both REC and Christ the King alongside the Arbour family. Everyone at Pillar is helping us find a church!

For both of our re-visits, Katie and I attended the Sunday School portion of the morning activities, as well as the corporate gathering. As we visit churches, we progress through levels of weekly commitments.

For our first visit of a church, we only attend the morning service. The first reason we do this is because, for many churches, it is easy to recognize that we are not interested, simply from the morning worship. If a church still looks promising after that one visit, however, we will visit a second time. The second reason we only go to the morning service is because it allows us to limit our interaction with the church. This is extremely helpful when we realize that the church we are visiting is not going to work for us; we can leave the service at the end in a non-awkward manner. Obviously, if we are enjoying the church, then we have the opportunity to stay and visit at the end.

On our second visit we will attend both the adult education time and the service. Going to Sunday School almost guarantees that we will meet people (which is desirable at this stage) and allows us to obtain a better, more in-depth view of the church. Potentially, we would stop visiting some churches at this stage.

On progressive visits we plan to attend more church events during the week, though we haven’t reached this point yet. It is likely that we won’t participate in events across multiple churches in the same week, though. We want to be able to recognize what a week in a given church might be like and we don’t want to overload our weeks and therefore burnout on our search.

For those of you keeping tabs, we are still interested in both REC and Christ the King, and we have only visited three churches so far. However, considering the qualifications we have for a church, it is unsurprising that our choices are limited. There is one more church which we have identified as a candidate. The church meets corporately on Sunday evenings and has a small group near us. However, our Sunday evening schedules are booked for the next few weeks, so it will be some time before we can visit.

At this point, we are not expecting to find any additional churches to consider, although we are definitely open to the idea. Please pray for wisdom and the Spirit’s guidance.

What do you think of our onion-layer approach to visiting churches? Did you have a plan the last time you had to find a new church? Leave a comment!

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1 I’m not naming the church, because although it’s evident that the church is not going to be a good fit for us, our visit did not dictate any reason to warn people who might otherwise visit.